A dozen goats, rented to clean lawn, roam the streets of Brookhaven

That’s what Sonya Parker thought when she saw that 12 goats, rented to clean up a neighbor’s yard, were wandering her Brookhaven neighborhood Friday.

It was the second time she’d herded wayward goats in her community after they’d escaped a nearby lawn.

“For five hours we had goats in our backyard,” she said. She kept a good attitude about the whole endeavor and shared pictures and live updates on the neighborhood app Nextdoor. “They were climbing up and down our deck, and underneath my deck they ate all my roses.”

The goats had a good time lounging around Parker's backyard.

Photo: Courtesy of Sonya Parker

The tribe of goats, she said, came from a company that rents out the cute animals to eat up weeds and unwanted vegetation in homeowners’ yards.

“They can clear out any brush and weeds, bushes, low-lying limbs, in a matter of two to three days,” she said. Popular goat rental companies in metro Atlanta include Get Your Goat Rentals and Red Wagon Goats, though she does not know which company Friday’s goats are from. Some metro Atlanta municipalities even use goats to clean up large parks.

She believes the electric fencing meant to keep the goats in her neighbor’s yard shorted out, and they came running onto her property.

Some of the goats wanted to come inside.

Parker and her dog — along with three Brookhaven police officers who had been called to the scene — helped herd the goats into her fenced-in backyard.

“It started the process of trying to figure out where the goats belonged,” she said. It didn’t take long to find the neighbor who had rented the goats, though the rental company arrived several hours later to move the goats back to the correct yard.

Last year, she said, it was a similar scene in her northern Brookhaven neighborhood, when a tribe escaped and she became the community’s de facto goat herder.

“Before that I found a pig in my carport,” she said. “That was in Buckhead.”